"There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."
Oscar Levant

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Pope Francis on Current Events

For John, BLUF: War is the human condition. Nothing to see here; just move along.

My Wife forwarded this item from Yahoo News (sourced from Reuters), about a homily by Pope Francis, delivered during services at a World War One War Memorial in Italy.

REDIPUGLIA Italy (Reuters) - Pope Francis said on Saturday the spate of conflicts around the globe today were effectively a "piecemeal" Third World War, condemning the arms trade and "plotters of terrorism" sowing death and destruction.

"Humanity needs to weep and this is the time to weep," Francis said in the homily of a Mass during a visit to Italy's largest war memorial, a large, Fascist-era monument where more than 100,000 soldiers who died in World War One are buried.

The pope began his brief visit to northern Italy by first praying in a nearby, separate cemetery for some 15,000 soldiers from five nations of the Austro-Hungarian empire which were on the losing side of the Great War that broke out 100 years ago.

"War is madness," he said in his homily before the massive, sloping granite memorial, made of 22 steps on the side of hill with three crosses at the top.

"Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction," he said.

As we look around it does, in a sense, resemble a world at war, albeit in a piecemeal fashion.

1 comment:

Raising Sunshine to be Hooked on Phonics
said...

Years ago, I remember reading a fact from an observational study in sociology that individual people, i.e., in the absence of a crowd mentality, who are more educated tend to be less violent; with the most dramatic numerical distinction evident between those who can read versus those who could not. Illiteracy is a growing problem in this country, and not just among the English speaking citizens/residents.

One could even make the case from history, that since the Jews have throughout the ages encouraged all the males in their congregation to read both in Hebrew and the language of the country in which they resided, they posed a threat to the Church who controlled all the legalities coming and going in a community because the clerics were the only ones who could read and by implication write. When the educated Jews became too numerous and the uneducated nobles started to hire Jews to teach them and their sons to read, the Church expelled the Jews from the country or killed them. Recall, even King John had to sign his name with only an X, because he could not read nor write, on one of the most progressive documents ever to hit the planet; the Magna Carta.

Now a days, as we have seen in the Levant an absence of readers leaves communities vulnerable to any cleric's interpretation of scriptures. I would like to emphasize here that these communities are filled with people who are trying to lead righteous lives. Their lack of an ability to read the Koran for themselves, especially among the women, is I believe, the only reason the ISIS radicals can gain a significant foothold. If you want to stop these types of violent religious radicals in the future, regardless of religion, you need to encourage women learning to read (the scriptures), even if you do not let them teach communities on the subject matter contained within.